Category: Tips

It’s easy to get hung up on creating new content. But what about all those articles you wrote years ago? Shouldn’t they get some love, too? 

A lot of those pieces could probably do with some attention. Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do with those old pieces of content to bring them back to life.

Why You Need to Update Content

Like many things in the content marketing world, you need to update old content, in part, to appease Google. It’s not because Google’s come out and said publication date is a ranking factor (although it could be). It’s because the search engine typically shows the publication date in its search results. You’re not going to get many users clicking on a link that’s five years old. 

Updating content can help you rank better, too, suggests blogger Pete McPherson. He has a nice strategy that blog owners can deploy to move old articles sitting on the second page of Google to the first page. 

Research by Botify has even found a correlation among the amount of content changed, Google’s crawl frequency and the average ranking of content. That being said, there have been several instances in which a piece of content’s ranking decreased after it was updated, writes Google engineer Kyle Blanchette. But consider your audience, too, he says. It’s worth updating your content so they are served the most useful information you can provide. 

This is a great point. Updating old content is a great way for brands to connect with readers and show them that they are serious about delivering the best experience — and that their content isn’t just there to please Google. 

Finally, updating content creates easy wins. In moments of economic crisis, when marketing budgets are tight, refreshing old content is a way to boost your campaigns with minimal investments.

4 Ways to Update Your Content

There are four things you can do with old content: you can rewrite it, repurpose it, republish it or delete it. No strategy is inherently better than the others, so we recommend taking things on a case-by-case basis. 

1. Rewrite It

The most common fix we see is for someone to rewrite some or all of the existing content. Sometimes, you’ll only need to change a paragraph or two. Other times, you’ll need to rewrite the whole piece. The important thing to note is that you are keeping the old post’s URL intact.

If you’ve tried to game Google with your writing in the past, updating your content now may be particularly worthwhile. Google’s algorithm has become substantially more advanced since the days of keyword stuffing, points out OptinMonster’s Jacinda Santora. Articles that are over-optimized for keywords don’t cut it in today’s SERPs.

Start the rewriting process by acting like an editor, recommends writer Jessica Greene. This means checking spelling and grammar, fixing broken links, updating images, and noting where the content needs to be improved. When it comes to rewriting the content itself, Greene advises using newly researched keywords where possible. Don’t fudge it, though. If you start to sound like a robot, leave that copy out. 

Don’t be surprised if you hit a few snags during the rewrite process. As blogger Lisa Koivu points out, sometimes your own URLs may prevent you from giving your content a full refresh. This issue is particularly common with WordPress websites, where the publication date is part of the article’s URL. Change the URL, and you lose the links that pointed to the content and all of the SEO traffic that went to it. 

2. Republish It

If the ideas in your old content are still relevant and useful, consider republishing it as a brand new article. This may require a bit more effort on your part, but it means you won’t be constrained by the topic or outline of your existing content.  

This is the approach Kristen Poborsky has taken with a piece of content on her blog. Rather than rewrite the existing piece, she decided to create a brand new guide that goes well beyond the scope of the original. If you’re following her approach, she recommends avoiding the use of dates and any other information that may cause the article to age quickly. Doing so will make it easier to update the article in the future.

If your website does add dates to URLs, a republish is the best solution for updating content. It’s even possible to republish an article without updating it much, writes Content Marketing Institute’s Kim Moutsos. Her team has done this several times, but they always make sure to update any links and details to ensure the piece is still accurate. An editor’s note is also added to explain why it has been republished.

If that old article still earns SEO traffic, you should add an editorial note at the top of the original article with a link that points users to the new article. This will help both readers and Google know which article is the most relevant.

3. Repurpose It

Rather than updating or republishing old content, you can give it a new life by turning the information into multiple different formats. One old blog post can easily become an infographic, a tweet and a YouTube video. 

It’s a great way to quickly create huge amounts of fresh content, writes Venngage’s Jeilan Devanesan. It can also help you reach a wider audience, too. When you convert written words into videos, podcasts and images, you increase the ways people can hear your message. Site traffic should increase, too, as you’ll be acquiring users from sites like YouTube and Pinterest, rather than just Google. 

Repurposing content neatly avoids the duplicate content issues you need to be careful of when rewriting and republishing content, adds Hatchbuck’s Natalie Slyman. You can’t get a duplicate-content penalty from Google if you are using multiple formats to get your ideas out. 

4. Delete It

Sometimes, the best thing to do with an old article is to delete it. Seriously, if it no longer serves your audience, it’s doing your brand a disservice to keep it around. That’s true even if it’s bringing in website traffic. What are those visitors going to think about your brand if your content is stale and outdated? 

House cleaning is essential if you’ve been creating content for a long time, writes Yoast’s Marieke van de Rakt. You can only have a couple of articles ranking for each keyword in Google. So, if you have more than three very similar articles, you’re just competing with yourself. 

Some decisions will be easy. That new feature release article you wrote five years about a feature that no longer exists? That can definitely go. A press release about that conference you attended last year? That can probably go, too.

Don’t get carried away, though. Plenty of old content can be rewritten, republished or repurposed. A lot of it probably should be used again. 

Use these questions from Search Engine Journal’s Danny Goodwin to decide what’s for the chop and what’s not:

• Does it get traffic?
• Has the page earned links?
• Does it rank highly?
• Will readers miss it?

Think twice about deleting content if you answer “Yes” to any of these questions.

If you’re still happy to delete your content, there’s one last thing you need to do. Make sure you redirect the URL, social media marketer Louise Myers writes. You don’t want users to land on missing pages and get a 404 error. They won’t like it, and neither will Google. 

The Beauty of Evergreen Content 

Updating content is something you’re always going to have to do if you want to keep your website in order. Advice will change, your brand will change, and global crises will come and go. A good blog will maintain its relevance during and after.

One way to keep your refresh work to a minimum is to create evergreen content where possible. This is content that is always relevant, as Ahref’s Si Quan Ong explains. When you have an evergreen topic to cover, you can create one great piece of content and keep adding to it — and repromoting it — over time. 

No piece of content is going to stay relevant forever. But if you pick topics that people are always interested in, avoid the use of dates, and make sure your language or angle doesn’t unnecessarily age the piece, you’ll have a lot less work to do in the future.

At Epic Presence, we don’t just specialize in helping you create fresh content. We can also help you breathe life into your old content. If you have an archive of content that’s yet to find the audience it deserves, we can help by implementing the strategies above, then performing influencer outreach to make sure your content gets seen.

Images by: Corinne Kutz, Thought Catalog, Austin Distel

Why does your style guide matter?

If your first response is “brand consistency,” you’re not alone. In a 2016 report, Demand Metric found that 90 percent of surveyed companies believed style guides helped promote important consistency in brand presentation. 

The right style guide, however, is aware of more than your company’s individual attempts to build a brand.

All content is a contribution to a conversation. As such, it responds to the same shaping forces as any other piece of persuasive or communicative work. Genre, audience and historical context all play a role in how content is understood.

The right style guide doesn’t just keep your content team on the same page. It also helps your team contribute to an ongoing conversation in a thoughtful, inclusive and agile manner.

How Your Style Guide Shapes Your Content

Style guides start by keeping everyone on the same page — both literally and metaphorically. A style guide helps settle questions surrounding spelling, punctuation and situations in which multiple versions of a phrase may each be grammatically correct.

Lack of a style guide can cause variations that frustrate writers, editors and readers alike. For instance, SmartBug contributor Joe Gillespie began writing for SmartBug in the days before the company had instituted a style guide. 

“When I started seeing terms spelled three different ways in content our agency produced, I wanted to scream,” Gillespie writes. “The problem wasn’t that my coworkers were careless, but rather, people tend to be unconsciously more focused on getting the words out of their heads and not think about what those words should look like on a screen.”

Style guides help ensure that “what those words should look like on a screen” is consistent and welcoming to audiences. By doing so, a style guide helps reduce the risk that a reader will become confused or angered by inconsistencies or inappropriate terms while consuming your organization’s content.

Diversity and Inclusion: Keeping Your Team Focused

Language changes quickly. A style guide that doesn’t account for the ways in which people from various backgrounds refer to themselves or wish to be referred to by others runs the risk of sounding hopelessly outdated. At best, this outdatedness will seem quaint; at worst, it will be offensive.

One of the best ways to ensure your style guide addresses everyone in your potential audience inclusively is to examine the ways in which various minority groups have navigated identifying language. 

A number of organizations for journalists, for instance, have published guides to help content creators build style guides, articles and other works. Commonly referenced examples include the following:

• Asian-American Journalists Association: Covering Asian America
• National Association of Black Journalists: Style Guide
• National Center on Disability and Journalism: Style Guide
• National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Stylebook Supplement on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Terminology

The Michigan State School of Journalism offers several online guides compiled with the assistance of the communities they describe. Resources are currently available on appropriate ways to discuss Native American, Hispanic/Latino, and Muslim individuals and issues. 

Some activist organizations and interest groups offer guidance, as well. For instance, Gender Spectrum hosts a guide to The Language of Gender, which focuses on gender descriptors and their uses. TEAM Up offers a one-page style supplement sheet, intended to complement use of the AP Stylebook, for anyone reporting on mental health or mental illness-related topics.

Why Focus on Inclusion?

When content consistently refers to certain groups or individuals using outdated or offensive terms, it risks alienating not only the people to whom those words refer, but also those who seek greater inclusiveness in their own interactions. 

Chocolate maker Cadbury provides a visual example of how outdated thinking can offend audiences. In August 2019, the company released its Unity Bar, advertised as a celebration of Indian Independence Day. The chocolate bar contained squares of dark, mixed, milk and white chocolate. 

This ended up getting roundly criticized for trivializing racism, though. “By creating a blended bar with four different shades of brown, Cadbury intended to celebrate the multi-cultural society in India,” Dr. Pragya Agarwal writes at Forbes. “Instead, they have created a product that demonstrates what tokenistic diversity looks like.”

Companies would make the same mistake in their content by failing to consider a wide range of perspectives. For instance, restricting perspectives in marketing content can lead to the use of outdated or even offensive language that alienates readers, who interpret such language as a sign that they are members of the out-group. 

These mistakes are not inevitable. By including multiple perspectives in the process of creating a style guide, an organization can help ensure it avoids gaffes like Cadbury’s — in either chocolate or written form. 

Tips and Resources for Thoughtful Style Guide Development

A style guide can do it all: maintain brand consistency and offer sensitive contributions to cutting-edge conversations. Creating a thoughtful, inclusive style guide needn’t be a monumental task, either.

Start With an Existing Guide

Most content producers don’t need to build a style guide from scratch. Adopting an existing style guide can help ease the transition from “no style guide” to “follow these rules.” 

Commonly used style guides in content creation include the Associated Press Stylebook (often just called “AP”) and The Chicago Manual of Style (“Chicago” or “CMS”). Several academic and professional organizations have their own style manuals, as well, including the Modern Language Association (common for works in the humanities) and the American Psychological Association (often used in the sciences). 

AP and Chicago are commonly used, so readers might feel an early sense of familiarity with content that follows their guidelines. When readers don’t risk being tripped by unfamiliar spellings or configurations, they can absorb content more easily. 

Be Willing to Deviate When Necessary

AP is one of the most commonly used style guides, but it isn’t always at the forefront of language or cultural change. 

For instance, this Conscious Style Guide piece by Henry Furhmann raised issues about hyphenated terms like “African-American” more than a year before the Associated Press decided to embrace “African American” rather than its hyphenated predecessor.

“Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure but also something not American,” Fuhrmann writes of the hyphen. 

The Associated Press is aware of the way language changes, says Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations. Since changes to the stylebook are based on a critical mass of research and expert opinions as to language use, however, they can often lag behind actual changes in the most inclusive way to refer to people, communities, issues or events.

Staying on top of language change, even when it means staying ahead of another organization’s style guide, can help an organization avoid alienating its audiences by using a term that has developed a derogatory connotation. 

Set Intentions at the Start

Need help deciding when to deviate? Consider starting your style guide project with a preamble. The preamble will “articulate exactly what this content style guide is for — what we hope to achieve by creating and using it,” says Yuval Keshtcher at UXPin.

Start with a brief statement that expresses the style guide’s goals. For instance, the preamble might state that the style guide exists to “maintain consistency in brand voice and develop a sense of inclusivity and awareness of global issues within our content.”  

A preamble not only helps keep the rest of the style guide project on track, but it also helps other users within an organization understand why the style guide places certain demands on expression. 

Keep It in One Place

Mailchimp’s original style guide was a PDF file. Shortly after sending it to the rest of the Mailchimp team for the first time in 2015, however, creator Kate Kiefer Lee discovered that the Mailchimp style guide PDF met the same fate as many other internal PDF mailings: People received it, but they never looked at it.

The solution? Move the style guide to GitHub. This public location also allowed Mailchimp to practice the company’s value of making information accessible and transparent to others. 

Today, Mailchimp’s style guide lives on a publicly accessible subdomain inside Mailchimp’s own site. It’s broken down into a number of subcategories. As a living document, the style guide is updated regularly to ensure consistency and responsiveness to changes in the multitude of conversations and genres in which Mailchimp contributes content.

Your organization’s style guide doesn’t have to live on a web page for public view. It should, however, be kept in a file or document that can be easily accessed, updated and checked for consistency. By doing so, your organization can be certain that its consistent style, tone and approach to key conversations continues to change with the times, rather than fossilizing. 

Images by: Andrew Neel, langstrup/©123RF.com, olegdudko/©123RF.com

Content marketing strategies were born to help companies reach customers. 

Provide a steady stream of articles or videos with curiosity-piquing headlines, content-marketing wisdom said, and internet audiences will engage with them. Increased engagement prompts search engines to continue bumping the content’s source to the top of the list, reaching more audiences who can’t resist a click. The cycle repeats. 

Content marketing strategies, however, tend to be content-neutral: They work regardless of whether the content in question is an innocuous attempt to sell a household item or an insidious endeavor to sell extreme ideologies. 

And some sources of extreme ideologies have taken advantage of this fact. It’s why so many white nationalist and other extreme right-wing views often come packaged in the same style as “five weird tricks to eliminate cellulite!” — and why internet users need to understand clickbait tricks in order to fight back. 

Clickbait, Information Addiction and the Psychology of Headlines

Clickbait is specifically designed to hook our attention and reel us in. Often, the content promised by a clickbait title is sparse in the actual article or video. Instead, we’re presented with a handful of photos or one-line quips scattered among a slew of ads. 

It only takes a few rounds of clickbait ads before the average internet user can predict what a clickbait-y title has in store for them. Yet even when we know what’s in store, we often can’t resist clicking the link.

There are several reasons we fall for clickbait, says psychologist Mike Brooks, Ph.D. First, information has survival value for humans, which means that we’re drawn to sources of new information — especially when the price of access is a simple click. 

“Clickbait works, in part, because the promise of compelling information activates a particular dopamine pathway,” Brooks says. “Dopamine is released and creates an itch that can only be scratched by obtaining the promised information.”

Clickbait is also appealing because it piques our curiosity. We want to know “what’s behind the curtain,” Brooks says. This desire to know is also the result of a dopamine release, which is implicated in the sense of satisfaction we get from discovering the answer.

What is the one weird trick that will save me $500 on my car insurance? How did these 15 shocking celebrity marriages end? Clicking satisfies our curiosity … until the next headline comes along. 

The power of clickbait, however, persists beyond the moment we click to satisfy our itch to know. Clickbait also derives power from the psychology of headlines themselves.

How First Impressions Change Our Memories

Headlines provide our first introduction to the contents of an article. As popular wisdom holds, first impressions make a difference: They influence how we feel or think about a person or subject.

Research indicates, however, that first impressions do more than influence our feelings. They also influence what we are capable of remembering from an interaction or event.

For instance, in a 1997 study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Gregory J. Digirolamo and Douglas L. Hintzman describe how they showed test subjects a series of five images, one at a time. All five were identical except that in each showing of the series either the first image or the fifth image was reversed. The subjects were then asked which image they’d seen more: The one reversed image or the four standard images?

As it turned out, the answer depended on when in the series subjects had seen each version of the image. If the flipped image appeared last, subjects said they saw the standard image more often. If it appeared first, however, subjects said they saw the flipped image more often — even though they had actually seen it only 20 percent of the time.

The first impression, therefore, didn’t only affect how subjects felt about the next four impressions. It also affected their memories of which images they had actually seen. 

Headlines Change Our Understanding of Content

For a 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Ullrich K. H. Ecker and fellow researchers tried to test similar effects of first impressions on memory, and they did so with headlines.

In one experiment, the researchers handed subjects one of two identical articles on burglary rates in Australia. The article noted that burglary rates had declined 10 percent over the previous decade, but had experienced an anomalous 0.2-percent bump in the most recent year. The two articles, however, had diverging headlines: One claimed the number of burglaries was increasing while the other emphasized the long-term downward trend in burglaries.

Readers were asked to read the article, then take a pop quiz on its contents. In each case, the headline affected the details readers remembered: Those who read the “increasing” headline said burglaries were going up while those who read the “decreasing” headline said burglaries were going down. 

Headlines Reaffirm Our Knowledge

Finally, headlines may entrench us further in our own opinions when they support what we already believe — regardless of whether our beliefs are based in fact. 

For instance, a 2007 article by John R. Surber and Mark Schroeder in Contemporary Educational Psychology describes how the researchers tested reading speed and comprehension of college students who read a chapter of informative text. Students read each chapter both with and without headings to guide them through the information. About half the students had significant prior knowledge in the text’s content area, and about half did not. After reading, students were asked to take a short recall test.

Surber and Schroeder found that the headings were most helpful for readers who already had high prior content knowledge. The headings appeared to reinforce what the readers already knew. These readers also spent more time reading pages with headings than pages without.

It’s unlikely that clickbait headlines like “You Won’t Believe How Cute These 47 Raccoons Are!” reinforce known or believed information for most readers (raccoon aficionados notwithstanding). Clickbait headlines that promote extreme political or social viewpoints or that repeat conspiracy theories, however, are more likely to reaffirm what adoptees of those views already believe. 

Far Right Clickbait Tactics

Because clickbait headlines take advantage of our brain’s neurotransmitter-based curiosity system, they’re a powerful draw for attention, even when we would otherwise not be interested in the content presented. 

This has made clickbait a popular tactic among white nationalist, alt-right and far-right groups, who might otherwise struggle to get their ideas in front of a mass audience. Many such groups have leveraged clickbait tactics on social media to spread their ideas, leaving the platforms scrambling to keep up. 

What is Truth, Anyway?

One way clickbait grabs attention is by playing fast and loose with the truth. “Clickbait isn’t a spit-shined sales pitch meant to lightly elevate the quality of your genuinely decent goods and services, it’s often a blatant lie designed to disguise the goods’ irreparable shoddiness,” reporter Luke O’Neil writes at Mediaite.

Some clickbait trades on blatantly false headline statements. These headlines often fall into the category of “fake news,” such as a 2017 clickbait headline that read “NPR: 25 Million Votes for Clinton ‘Completely Fake’ — She Lost Popular Vote.” The fake headline was accompanied by a photo of Hillary Clinton. 

Why do photos matter? A second experiment by Ecker and colleagues demonstrates that when an article contains a photograph of a person who is also mentioned in the headline, our impression of that person more strongly correlates with the impression the headline seeks to create. 

Ecker and colleagues tested this hypothesis by pairing photographs with headlines that mentioned either a criminal culprit or a crime victim. In half the articles, the person mentioned in the headline was also the person in the photo; in the other half, the headline mentioned the criminal while the photo was of the victim, or vice versa.

Subjects read the articles and then rated each photo on factors known to be influenced by first impressions, like attractiveness, trustworthiness and aggression. When the headline named the person in the photo, subjects were more likely to rate “criminals” negatively and “victims” highly, regardless of whether the news story itself were true.

Fake news headlines like “25 Million Votes for Clinton ‘Completely Fake’ — She Lost Popular Vote” are thus more likely to gain traction when paired with photos of the person in the headline. Readers’ impression of Clinton may be soured, even if the headline itself is false or does not accurately represent the contents of the article.

Promoting Ideas That Cannot Be Falsified

At best, clickbait headlines grab attention by making claims that aren’t falsifiable — that is, they cannot be proven true one way or another. Author and reporter David A. Tomar gives the example of a headline that claims “These are the absolute most adorable piglets you’ll ever see.” 

“It’s not that you won’t see adorable piglets when you click on the link,” Tomar writes. “It’s that there’s no way of objectively proving that they are the most adorable pigs you will ever see.”

These non-falsifiable claims are popular in right-wing headlines. Breitbart News, for instance, frequently inserts subheadlines like “Leftists Rage at Jokes” (by comedian Ricky Gervais). While surely someone, somewhere has strongly disliked one of Gervais’ jokes, finding that person and verifying their credentials as a “leftist” (by whose definition?) is nearly impossible.

The truth value of clickbait headlines isn’t the point; the interest generated by them is. This feature allows extreme views to grab attention while also, when necessary, fudging the facts. 

TroLOL

White nationalists and other extremists have also taken advantage of clickbait’s tendency to make hyperbolic claims, as well as the now-common expectation that the article behind the headline won’t actually live up to the headline itself. 

Breitbart headlines, for instance, are designed to provoke and offend. Breitbart “tends to take offensiveness as a virtue,” says George Hawley, a professor and historian of the American right. “There’s a trollish element to it.”

Many online trolls claim they attempt to offend or outrage others merely for amusement. For many far-right media personalities, however, the attempt to offend or outrage with a clickbait-y title is intended to grab interest and draw in readers or viewers. 

For instance, an article in The Economist quotes far-right author and speaker Ben Shapiro’s reliance on controversy to command attention: “If I can use the methodologies of gaining eyeballs to get people to look into deeper content, then I’m going to do that,” Shapiro says. 

Algorithms Love Audience Engagement

Radical right-wing messages have also gained traction thanks to the algorithms that social media use to drive their own traffic and promote content. 

For instance, YouTube struggled for years with the proliferation of extreme content, as Brian Feldman at the New York Intelligencer writes. Employees at YouTube who attempted to report on the growing problem found themselves at odds with the company’s primary goal: increase viewer engagement. 

Far-right content drove engagement. Viewers who clicked on one were likely to watch more, driven not only by their own curiosity but also by YouTube’s algorithms, which were designed to suggest more videos that might pique the interest of a particular video’s audience.

At one point, YouTube even sought to encourage further viewing and content generation by creating an algorithm that would reward video creators based on engagement. Videos that got more views, or were viewed for longer, would receive a payout, even if they didn’t run ads. 

The project did not, however, account for the troll effect. The algorithm would have paid more for videos that got views based on outrage rather than genuine interest, potentially making YouTube even more fertile ground for far-right messaging. 

“If [the algorithm] went into effect … it’s likely that someone like Alex Jones — the Infowars creator and conspiracy theorist with a huge following on the site, before YouTube booted him last August — would have suddenly become one of the highest paid YouTube stars,” Mark Bergen at Bloomberg reports.

The Social Media Echo Chamber

Why does social media presence matter so much? For one thing, we may be more likely to believe headlines we’ve seen more than once. 

For a 2018 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone D. Cannon and David G. Rand used actual fake news headlines gleaned from Facebook to test whether readers would respond to the fake claims as if they were accurate. 

The researchers found that not only did seeing fake news headlines make readers more likely to believe the headlines, but that seeing such headlines more than once reinforced the belief — and that this effect persisted even when the statements were highly (though not entirely) implausible.

“These observations indicate that although extreme implausibility is a boundary condition of the illusory truth effect, only a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition to increase perceived accuracy,” Pennycook, Cannon and Rand write.

Blurring the Lines

Finally, far-right clickbait has been able to worm its way into mainstream discourse by straddling the line between extremism and conversation. 

For instance, in April 2019, Vice reporters Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler noted that while Twitter had largely eliminated pro-ISIS content from its site, the social media giant hadn’t done much to eliminate white supremacist content. The reason given: Twitter executives feared that targeting white supremacist content would inadvertently sweep up more mainstream Republican content in the ban, as well. 

Twitter VP of Global Communications Brandon Borrman pushed back at this characterization of the company’s policies. And in fact, the task of targeting white supremacist content via algorithm may be a tall order, as The Verge’s Casey Newton explains. While the technology remains in limbo, however, white supremacists continue to find Twitter and other platforms a welcoming ground for their rhetoric. 

Fighting Back: How to Avoid Taking the (Click)Bait

It’s not always easy to avoid falling for clickbait, Brooks says. Yet there are methods you can use to keep extreme clickbait content off your own social media feeds. And if you can’t help but react, you can do so in ways that don’t also increase the reach of the content. 

Wield the Banhammer

Social media sites have begun cracking down on content that expresses white nationalist or other extreme views. For instance, in April 2019 Facebook announced a ban on white nationalist content after the Christchurch shooter broadcast his actions on Facebook Live, Andrew Hutchinson at Social Media Today reports.

While Facebook’s attempts may help, it’s unlikely that they will prevent every instance of far-right or white nationalist content from floating across your feed. Tools like Facebook and Twitter’s block functions, however, allow individual users to cut certain sources out of their feeds entirely.

Twitter also offers two features to help fine-tune your feed:

• The Mute function allows you to stop seeing content from a particular user without blocking them entirely. 
• The Mute Words feature allows you to prevent tweets that contain certain words or hashtags from appearing in your feed. 

While it’s not perfect — you can’t mute words contained in someone’s Twitter handle or username, for instance — the Mute Words function does filter out most tweets that contain a muted word or phrase. Muting can also be limited by time period or set to last indefinitely.

Screenshot, Don’t Share

If you simply cannot resist snarking back at a right-wing, white nationalist or otherwise extremist clickbait headline, take a screenshot of the original to post to your own social media account rather than sharing the link. 

Screenshots help reduce the spread of the original content. Your followers can see what you’re responding to, but they won’t be giving traffic to the publisher unless they search out the original article themselves. They also prevent your take on the original content from being interpreted as engagement by search engines, which cannot tell the difference between a social media share of approval and one of criticism. 

By thinking about how search engines and social media sites interpret your reaction to clickbait, you can circumvent the system by which white nationalist and other extreme viewpoints circulate. You can also reduce the amount of extremist clickbait on your own feeds, thus protecting your own peace of mind. 

Images by: alphaspirit/©123RF.com, Antonio Guillem/©123RF.com, Sergey Skripnikov/©123RF.com

When we are discussing new projects with potential clients, we often get asked, “Why shouldn’t I just hire a writer to do this?” Granted, our fees can roughly equate to a staff writer’s monthly salary, but this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Hiring a new staff writer is completely different from hiring an agency because with an agency you get an entire team of people with very specialized skills. 

In this article, we will explore why one person is unlikely to pull off the content campaign of your dreams. Then, with as little bias as we can, we will compare the work of building an internal content team vs. hiring an agency. 

One Person Can’t Execute an Entire Content Campaign Alone

If your budget allows you to hire three or four people, then there may be some advantages to bringing all of your content marketing in-house. If you choose that route, we encourage you to go into it with your eyes wide open. 

Consider the work that goes into a single piece of content: 

• Strategy. There must be a larger strategy that informs the angle each piece takes. More on that in a moment.
• Research. Any blog post worth reading requires at least three hours of good research.
• Writing. Most writers will need to carve out blocks of hours for the focused work of writing.
• Editing. Someone with subject-matter understanding needs to put their eyes on the copy. Ideally, that person would also understand things like adherence to style guidelines, rhythm, flow, grammar and all the other basics of copy editing. If not, the piece needs a third pair of eyes.
• Promotion. For our content, two dozen emails might get sent out to influencers. Someone has to manage those response threads and take any number of actions. That work could include coordinating future content partnerships, making corrections to the published copy or vetting responses for their lead potential. For some of our clients, there’s a followup round of social media promotion.

Now, think about everyone you know. Think about the people on your team. Think about all of the people you’ve interviewed but not hired. Those you’ve met at networking events. How many could own — actually succeed at — each one of these tasks? 

Before you commit to an answer, let’s return to the lingering question of strategy. 

Content Strategies Are Collaborative

A good content agency will have executed hundreds of campaigns, and their strategies evolve as they test out ideas, analyze results, make changes and iterate. We outlined our strategy process in this post, but here’s the quick and dirty version:

• We establish the throughline that connects a client’s mission, their business model and their audience.
• We map out that audience’s needs, the publications they read and the influencers they trust.
• We pitch topics and generate an entire editorial calendar that, topic by topic, speaks to all the nuanced concerns an audience could have.

It takes a team to brainstorm a coherent strategy. This reason, above all, is why a single writer cannot successfully execute a content campaign by themselves.

Benji Hyam, cofounder of Grow and Convert, makes a similar point on his company’s blog: “I’d say hiring an in-house writer or team of in-house writers is a good option if you’re a larger company and can afford to pay someone or multiple people full-time to do mostly writing. It also might be a good option if you need one person with deep industry expertise to constantly write about one space.

“However, for most businesses, hiring one person in-house with the intention of having them write content, manage a content calendar, distribute content, etc. is not a good idea.”

Vetting and Hiring a Good Writer Takes a Lot of Time

Here’s a number that’s remained pretty consistent in our five-plus years as a company: It takes about 300 applications for us to find one or two writers we want to work with.

That means we have to read 300 emails, 300 resumes and 300 sets of clips before we identify a couple of people who demonstrate the experience, curiosity and skill we need to publish thoughtful longform content.

Then, we hire a handful of writers for several rounds of test projects. (Note: Those have to be paid test projects. You won’t recruit any good writers by handing out unpaid assignments.) A good baseline we’ve found: Pay at least three different writers to take on three projects. In order to vet these writers effectively, we have found that we need to give them the same three test projects. This costs thousands of dollars and delivers a surprisingly small amount of useful copy.

All in all, the time between a candidate’s initial application and their first round of regular assignments is at least a month or more. During those weeks, in addition to the time and costs outlined above, our leadership team spends many hours reviewing, editing and training these candidates. You can expect the same for your company if you want to hire an in-house writer or a freelancer.  

Keep in mind this is for the writing work only. The strategy, content promotion and other necessary components of a healthy, profitable campaign will require different personalities and skill sets, all of which get separate hiring processes.

Content Promotion Requires a Different Mindset Than Writing 

The best writers tend to be introverted. The best promoters tend to be extroverted. Asking someone who is good at one to do the other is a recipe for disaster. 

For someone who isn’t a natural promoter and networker, it can be deceptively difficult to learn content promotion. There is no shortage of blog posts, videos and various other tutorials about promoting content. The problem, however, is this world evolves quickly. Once you’re reading someone’s how-to guide on content promotion, that tactic’s effectiveness has already expired.

Trying to train an in-house writer to handle content promotion is futile. You need to hire for that skill. To do so, you need to look for someone who has lots of experience. They will know what methods of promotion no longer work, and which do. 

Remember, too, that any content promoter is only as good as the networks they are plugged into, both online and offline. If your content outreach candidate cannot clearly describe how they keep up with trends, you should probably keep looking. 

All of this is to say that a good content promoter — someone who is connected, energetic and inspired — is incredibly hard to find. 

Internal Teams Cannot Scale a Campaign at a Moment’s Notice

Let’s say your company has been the exception to the rules above. 

You have a killer writer who knows your audience and creates content that consistently resonates with them. Your head of marketing puts eyes on all the copy before it goes live, so posts are going up clean. And there’s still enough time during the week for promo emails, tweets and LinkedIn updates.

Things are going great, in fact. Your blog’s traffic is seeing month-on-month growth, people are engaging with your promotional tactics, and your content funnel is generating leads.

That’s when you run into one of the iron-clad laws of marketing: When something works, do more of it.

So, how do you scale your content efforts? Your awesome writer is at capacity, and your head of marketing doesn’t have the time to read additional drafts. 

Hiring one or two new writers is an option. Of course, that means someone has to vet hundreds of applications and test out writers. In the very best case scenario, you’re a month away from being able to double your output. 

It takes a team to actually scale at a rate that will keep pace with the growth of your marketing successes. That team must include writers, editors, content promoters and strategists.

“With a boutique content marketing agency, you get an account manager that puts together the content strategy, and a team of expert writers who deliver on it, well, expertly,” writes Daniel Tay, cofounder of the Singapore agency With Content. “Equally, as your content marketing efforts begin to grow, they should also be able to tap into their resources and produce more content for you readily.”

With a team, you don’t need to wait 30 days to double your content output. You can quadruple that output from tomorrow if you need to.

Questions?

If you don’t have the budget to hire an in-house team, and even hiring an agency is a stretch financially, then it may not be the right time for you to invest in content marketing. In most industries, the competition is already too steep for semi-committed content marketing to work. Perhaps it would be better to spend marketing dollars elsewhere.

If you’re stuck, we’d be happy to discuss this with you. Exploring what an agency can do for your content marketing can be a revelatory conversation that shines a light on some fundamental need your company has.

Please send any questions you might have to us via our contact form. Seriously — we love the chance to help someone get their marketing on track, whether that’s via collaboration with us or through some other means.

Images by: Joe Gardner, Headway, Bonneval Sebastien